From PHP guides to small marketing. From ePayments all the way through to BioTech. Your all-tech passport.

Feb 26, 2014

Top 3 Free Banner Maker Resources

We
all know that the look of your website has a big impact on your
visitors. This is the first thing that they see and can make them decide
to stay or leave. Maybe you have a bad design and they will think that
your website is outdated or maybe your site is too flashy and shows no
credibility.

In either case you need to have an adequate design to match
the purpose of your website and your targeted audience.

Two important elements on every blog are the header and the banners :

a) The Header – is part of your brand and is a way to differentiate yourself from others

b) The Banner
– helps you to catch the visitors attention and redirect them to a
specific location or page (a product, a service or even another website)

There are two ways to obtain a nice header or banner:

1) Hire a pro – which is a great option for those that have funds to invest in their website.

2) Do it yourself
– which is a great option if you have the knowledge to use different
graphic softwares like Photoshop or Corel or any other program on the
market.

For those that don’t have any web design skills nor budget to acquire a proper design, there is a third solution – Free Banner Maker Websites !

They
are very intuitive and easy to use and, on top of all, provide very
nice banners or even headers because most of them lets you choose the
size and format. Below I have quickly reviewed the top 3 banner maker
websites that I stumbled upon.

Fotor Banner Maker – A
great website with nice layout a lot of powerful features that can help
build professional looking banners. You have the ability to customize
everything from the size, the background, adding text or graphics and
everything in between just by clicking and editing the items.

The first thing you need to choose is how you want to go about it:

1) Choose a predefined size and template

2) Enter a custom size and make everything from scratch

After
that you will enter the dashboard where you can start compiling/editing
your desired banner. On the left side you have the control panel where
all the tools are.

If you want to add a picture or graphic, you
can do so by going to right sidebar and choosing the location of the
picture (Computer, Facebook, Flickr or the Web).

When
you are happy with the result, you can simply press Save, change the
file name, select the format (.jpg or .png), click again Save and then
select the location where you want the file saved in your computer.

BannerFans Banner Maker
– A straight forward banner maker where you are guided, step by step,
thru the whole process. It is not as powerful Fotor (my personal
opinion) but it’s easier to use and you can save your work in 3
different formats – PNG, JPG and GIF.

Every time you make changes, you can click the “Update my banner” button to see exactly how it will look like after edits.

As
with the previous website, you can choose a preset format or you can
enter a custom size that will fit your needs. This is done in the Layout
tab where you can also choose background colors and many other options.
The next two tabs are for the text you want to be added and
customizations like shadows and effects.

The Border
tab will let you add…uhhh…borders to your banner J Is a good way to make
a banner stand out and depending on the purpose, you have 5 options –
No border, Solid, Dashed, Double solid and Double dashed (like I did in
the example above).

WebBanner24 Banner Maker
– Very simple to navigate thru all the option because all you need is
the left sidebar. You can easily select a size template or use a custom
size and then you can start editing the background, add text, border,
filters or even animations.

As
you can see from the sample above, in just a few minutes you can have a
pretty basic banner done. Is not the best looking by far, but is so
easy. And sometimes we just need something quick that will do the job.

This
are my picks for top 3 banner maker websites ! Which one do you like
more ? Do you know another great resource for creating free banner ? If
so, please let me know in the comment section bellow !